Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics

Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeare's plays reveal there is always something more terrifying to the king than rebellion. The book seeks to move beyond the presumption that political evolution leads ineluctably away from autocracy and aristocracy toward republicanism and popular sovereignty. Instead, it argues for affirmative politics in Shakespeare - the process of transforming scenes of negative affect into political resistance.

Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeare's affirmative politics appears not in his dialectical opposition to sovereignty, absolutism, or tyranny; nor is his affirmative politics an inchoate form of republicanism on its way to becoming politically viable. Instead, this study claims that it is in the place of dissensus that the expression of the eventful condition of affirmative politics takes place - a fugitive expression that the sovereign order always wishes to shut down.

Thomas P. Anderson is an Associate Professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (2006) and the editor, with Ryan Netzley, of Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (2010).